I wrote beautiful flowing verses of poetry in high school of such profundity that angels wept and the muses abandoned all other mortals that they might bestow the sum of their further graces solely upon me. My rhymes were honey upon the tongue and my metre so precise and stirring as to be thought stolen from the architecture of the universe itself. But then, didn’t we all?2. Are you a pantser or a planner?

Hmm… Let’s say a “planster.” I always have an overall concept/plot well defined before I start. I then usually write and rewrite the first…

In the village where I was born there was a cottage hospital and here, between finishing A levels and going to drama school, I went to work as a pre-student nurse. The work was mainly menial – making beds, emptying bed-pans and feeding patients. Since the ward I was on was Men’s Surgical, I was also expected to shave the patients. (Before you men get a fit of the horrors I’d better say I’m talking about their face.)

Why these lovely, mainly elderly gentlemen weren’t to be trusted with a razor I couldn’t say and never thought to ask. Maybe it was the absence of mirrors, considered by the ward sister an unnecessary frivolity. Whatever the reason, I was ordered to shave these old gentlemen and can still see their mild, benign faces striving not to register despair as I approached with water and shaving mug.